The Islanders

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  But she had to. She feared Maggie would end up attending the Community College of Rhode Island, Flanagan Campus, returning home every weekend to stay with Joy because the eighteen roommates with whom she was sharing a two-bedroom in Lincoln made it impossible to get any work done. And of course community college was a viable option and she could always transfer to a four-year college at some point, but Joy had always believed that Maggie was meant for a four-year private liberal arts education—the kind that Joy had been unable to afford for herself. She could see Maggie at Williams or Amherst or Mount Holyoke.

  Dustin said, “Hmm.” He picked up a whoopie pie and put the whole thing in his mouth.

  Joy studied him. Sure, he was skinny, but so many other changes had occurred since Joy had known him well. His flat stomach might scream, I HAVE THE METABOLISM OF A HUMMINGBIRD, but his thinning hair, the lines around his mouth, his old jeans: these things screamed, I AM APPROACHING MIDDLE AGE!

  “I thought you were doing well!” said Dustin, talking around the whoopie pie. “The place is always crowded. That’s what Mags said.”

  Ugh, thought Joy. Don’t call her Mags. You don’t deserve to call her Mags. “It is doing well,” she said defensively. “But it’s not that simple. There’s some competition this summer . . .”

  “That food truck?” said Dustin. “Mags told me about that. Sounds awesome!”

  Joy thought, Shut up, Dustin. And stop saying awesome. You’re not a teenager. But she said, “And the rent on the building went up.” She tried to hold her voice steady. “It’s just hard to get ahead, that’s all.”

  Dustin nodded with what Joy at first mistook for genuine sympathy. Then he said, “You know what, Joy? I wish I could help. I really do. She’s such a great kid.” (No thanks to you, thought Joy.)

  “But,” said Joy.

  “But. I just don’t have any extra right now, you know? Man, little kids are expensive. You wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Oh, I would,” said Joy. She thought about the year Maggie turned six and had a growth spurt that caused her to outgrow all of her clothes in one winter. She thought about the year the roof leaked in the shop and she’d had to replace the mixer. She thought about the time three years ago when Pickles broke her leg and had to be treated by an off-island vet.

  “And Sandy’s whole family is out in L.A., so plane tickets back and forth a few times a year, you know? It adds up. It really adds up. Sandy’s not working anymore, to be home for Tiki.”

  “How nice for her,” said Joy. She squeezed the sentence out from between gritted teeth.

  “So, man, I’m really sorry I can’t help in, like, a regular way, you know? I mean, I’ll do what I can, but I just can’t guarantee anything.” Dustin ate two more whoopie pies in rapid succession. “Hey, where do you think that food truck is today? It’s always in a different place, right?”

  “Yes,” said Joy. “But I don’t know where it is today.” She actually did know, but she wasn’t telling.

  “I’d love to bring back some of those cookies for Sandy and Teeks.” (Apparently Tiki was not enough of a nickname; it had to be further shortened.)

  Joy’s phone, which she had set on the table, buzzed. Dustin glanced at it and said, “You have a contact named Bridezilla?”

  Joy sighed. “It’s a long story.” She didn’t owe Dustin anything, not even an explanation. She let the call go to voice mail and she stood to indicate that she had many important matters to attend to. She knew that the next ferry back to Newport wasn’t for another ninety minutes and she didn’t want to be charged with babysitting her ex-husband. She had pies to make and Bridezillas to call back. Where, by the way, did Dustin come up with the money for an extra round-trip ferry ticket if he was so destitute?

  “Hey,” said Dustin, all smiles now that he wasn’t being shaken down for a monthly 529 contribution. “Mags says you’re dating someone? That’s great, Joy. That’s really great.”

  The last thing Joy needed was to be condescended to by the man who’d once crushed her spirit. She said, “Yes,” and nodded crisply. She picked up the plate and Dustin’s crumpled napkin. She almost ate the last whoopie pie, but then she remembered that she was saving up her appetite for a delectable dinner at Winfield’s with Anthony.

  Three nights before, Anthony had said I love you while she was grilling tuna. She’d pretended not to hear him. But now she wondered why she’d done that. Why was she holding back? What did she think she was waiting for? Why had she sent him out for olive oil, of all things? (She wasn’t even out of olive oil, it was just the first thing that came to mind.) She was an adult who had been more or less single for a full decade. Her ex-husband was so far out of the picture he couldn’t even cough up a couple of bucks for college tuition. She was on her own. It struck her now like a punch to the stomach that it was a very lonely place to be.

  Chapter 29

  Lu

  Lu, in the kitchen, could hear the soft murmurings of Maggie playing a game of Sorry! with the boys upstairs. Maggie had come straight from the ferry—she’d been visiting her father. Lu had only asked her to come at the last minute, last night, after the fight with Jeremy, who had left again this morning.

  She was working on a skillet cornbread, trying to figure out how to incorporate jalapeño peppers without making the bread too spicy to appeal to young palates. Honey would help. And definitely cheese. She chewed on her lip and wondered if she could simply swap out the ingredients from one of Dinner by Dad’s sweet cornbread recipes—maple cranberry, maybe. She had boiled the corn earlier that morning and now was slicing it from the cob. Very satisfying. She loved a task whose margins were clear: now the cob is clean, so now you are done.

  “Sorry!” rang out from upstairs. It sounded like Chase. He was gloating, so he’d probably knocked one of Sebastian’s pieces off. She listened carefully to find out what would happen after that. Sebastian wasn’t good at losing. That was why Lu didn’t play board games! It wasn’t worth the headache, even though she knew that lessons about winning and losing were crucial for children to learn at a young age, etc. She found it much easier to take the boys outside and let them run off all of their joys and frustrations until they were just well-behaved, tired boys, just shells. Lovable shells, of course. But shells. It was the same principle she’d seen applied to dog-rearing. Although they didn’t have a dog themselves, their neighbors in Connecticut owned a fearsomely energetic border collie named Gus, and much of the neighbors’ time seemed to be spent getting Gus tired enough so that he behaved like a regular dog. (Why not, then, get a regular dog? That’s what she always wanted to ask the neighbors.)

  “Sorry!” came again. This time it was Maggie, and the word sounded more gentle coming from her, as though she really did feel sorry. What a funny word: sorry. You could toss it around so casually when you accidentally cut somebody off in the grocery store or wanted the waitress to repeat the specials. Or you could scream it at someone, like she had last night at Jeremy, lying through both syllables.

  “What do you want?” she’d screamed finally, once they’d allowed the fight to escalate to the level they both secretly wanted it to be.

  “I want you to stop sneaking around behind my back! I want you to say you’re sorry! I want you to fire her.”

  Oh, it had been awful, the rage she’d felt. She’d felt like she could hurt someone.

  “Lu!” he said, when she didn’t answer. (His voice was so sharp!) “Did you hear me? I want you to fire her.”

  Lu understood that on the surface the fight was about Maggie, but on a deeper, more insidious level it was about the baby. A third baby would require resources; Jeremy didn’t want those resources going somewhere else. Jeremy didn’t want Lu physically or emotionally separated from the boys because he wanted her in the maternal mind-set.

  “Did you hear me, Lu?” His voice had turned gentler, but her ire was reaching toward the ceiling.

  “I heard you,” she yelled. “Fine! Okay! I’m sorry!”

>   That was all he’d needed, it turned out, the word, not the actual meaning behind the word. How easy it was sometimes to fake it.

  When Jeremy was sleeping she’d slipped out of bed to text Maggie. Can you come tomorrow too? Something came up.

  Sebastian came down in tears, complaining that Chase had knocked back his blue piece with the red piece and he’d had to go all the way back to the blue circle at the start.

  “But that’s how the game is played,” said Lu, though three-quarters of her mind was on the cornbread. (Was buttermilk absolutely necessary?) “If you landed on a space that Chase was on, you’d be able to do the exact same thing to him.”

  Lu and her sister had played endless board games when they were little, because they were so often alone while their mother was at work. Clue. Risk. Yahtzee. Trouble. Pre-Internet, of course.

  “Well, I didn’t like it,” said Sebastian. “Chase was being mean.”

  Lu sighed, turning her attention from her cornbread to her son. Maybe Sorry! was too complex for a four-year-old. Sebastian was too little to understand how much of it was just due to chance. Also it took a long time to get through a complete game, if she recalled correctly, probably far too long for his teeny-tiny attention span. He did look despondent. “Maggie!” she called up the stairs. “I think maybe a different game, if that’s okay!” Then she thought for a fraction of a second and added, “Sorry!” She didn’t know if Maggie would get the joke but she had given herself a little chuckle.

  “I want to stay with you,” Sebastian said.

  Lu hesitated and looked around the kitchen. “Sure, yeah, okay,” she said finally. “You can help me measure.”

  “No problem,” called Maggie. Lu could hear her making a game with Chase out of picking up the pieces and the cards and putting them back in the box, which was not something Lu would have thought to do. She would have left the pieces scattered upstairs and tripped over them later, crushing the cardboard box in the process.

  “Sebastian, come play with us!” Maggie called. “You’ll love this game, I made it up!”

  This seemed to pique Sebastian’s interest: he dropped the empty measuring cup he’d been holding and was gone without so much as a backward glance.

  Was everyone better at mothering her own boys than Lu was?

  Lu was in between years in law school when she met Jeremy, on Main Street in Hyannis, near the Puritan Clothing Shop. She’d been thrown from her bike because a man in a parked car had opened his door just as she flew past. She wasn’t hurt badly, but the shock of it had been something terrible, and she’d lain immobile on the street for a moment, trying to work out if she was going to cry or not.

  The man from the car was kneeling beside her, but Jeremy, who’d been parking his car when the accident happened, pushed him aside, almost roughly. “I’m a doctor,” he’d said. (That was a lie, it turned out; he was a second-year medical student.)

  “Don’t you worry,” Jeremy had said, once the driver had left them. “I’m in medical school. I can fix anything.”

  “Well, I’m in law school,” she’d answered. “So don’t mess up. I can sue anyone.”

  He had laughed at that. And while he was laughing he looked at her knee where the skin had shredded off, and then he swabbed at it with a square of sterile cotton that he seemed to have pulled out of thin air, and by the time he was finished she was perfectly bandaged and there wasn’t a trace of blood anywhere. He’d wheeled her bike carefully from the street to the sidewalk and then he said, “You’re lucky you didn’t bang your noggin. You should have been wearing a helmet.”

  “I know,” she said, touching her miraculously unharmed head, charmed by his use of the word noggin. “I know I should have been.”

  What if Lu hadn’t fallen off of her bike that day—what if she hadn’t even gotten on her bike, or had a bike to begin with? Lu rewound the tape in her mind all the way back to when she was a girl of five, the training wheels just off her pink Barbie-themed bike. One thing happened, then another—a seemingly random series of events—and then there was your future, sealed to this other person’s for such a long time, maybe even forever.

  Poor thing, she chided herself, your marriage isn’t what you expected it to be. She remembered a middle school joke where you would rub your thumb and forefinger together. What’s this? you’d say. It’s the world’s smallest violin, and it’s playing just for you! If her mother, her sister, any of the destitute people living in inner cities and third world countries could hear her, that’s what they’d do. They’d play the tiny violin. And she deserved it. Marital dissatisfaction is a problem of wealth and privilege, she reminded herself. You are lucky to have this problem, because you are lucky to have the leisure to worry about such things as you sit in the summer home that you did not arrange or pay for.

  Even so! She thought about a cookbook with her name on it. She thought about the Pioneer Woman and her empire (a boutique hotel! a housewares line!) that had all started with a blog. And she couldn’t help it: She wanted. She wanted.

  “What are you baking?” asked Maggie now. “It smells delicious!” Lu hadn’t actually begun baking anything yet, so that made her smile; either Maggie was having a Pavlovian response to the sight of the ingredients all laid out, or she was just really, really a nice kid. Her shirt said If History Repeats Itself, I’m Getting a Dinosaur.

  “Cornbread.”

  “I love cornbread!”

  Lu thought about Jeremy saying, “She’s a stranger to me.” She thought about the cookbook proposal she was working on, and she thought about the money in her secret account.

  “I’ll take you as many days next week as you’re free, by the way,” she said to Maggie.

  Chapter 30

  Joy

  Dinner at Winfield’s went extremely well. Joy had thrown all caution (and wisdom) to the wind and ordered the spaghetti carbonara with duck confit instead of the swordfish or the halibut, and Anthony had the grilled beef tenderloin. A seltzer for Anthony, and two glasses of Prisma Sauvignon Blanc for Joy. She was ready, if Anthony produced another I love you.

  Over the appetizer (they shared the seared scallops and the Narragansett Bay mussels), Joy pulled out a few of her favorite family stories—the time all four of her brothers got kicked out of Scottie’s Pub for fighting with each other, the time her sister-in-law Tina packed up her family after a day at Sandy Beach and drove a quarter of a mile away before she realized she’d left one of her kids behind, the time one of the Hallamore Clydesdales pulling Santa’s sleigh pooped on her father’s shoe before the annual Christmas parade. For dessert they shared a crème brûlée that was to die for.

  But Maggie was sleeping at home that night, no sleepover at Riley’s, no Dustin, so after dinner they parted ways, Anthony depositing a chaste peck on Joy’s lips. Joy’s entrée had been heavy on the garlic—was that to blame?

  Later, the cream from the carbonara wreaked havoc on Joy’s system. She came down with a case of heartburn. She tossed and turned for much of the night. It was too warm in her bedroom, but when she opened the windows there was so much street noise that she couldn’t fall asleep. She walked around the upstairs, checking on Maggie, checking on Pickles. (Both were slumbering soundly in Maggie’s bed.) She took three Tums and drank a glass of water. She returned to her own bed and tried every sleep aid app on her iPhone—Calm, Brain Waves, Sleep Genius, Sleep Pillow. Nothing worked. Everything seemed to make her brain race faster.

  Just after dawn she gave up and made coffee in the French press. When she looked in the mirror she saw that her eyes were puffy. Her head hurt. Her heart hurt. It was ridiculous. What, specifically, was wrong with her? Was she simply too full of rich food and wine, or was she in love? Was she heartsick? Pickles appeared from Maggie’s room.

  She sat on the deck with her coffee and watched the first streaks of light begin to swoop across the sky. Pickles sat on her feet. As she sipped, she felt the truth float toward her like an island breeze.

&nbs
p; She loved Anthony.

  She did.

  She’d been a fool to respond so cagily when he’d told her he was falling in love with her. (Out of olive oil?) She’d been scared, that was all. But despite all of her proud status as an independent woman, despite all the years-old disappointment with her marriage and the bitter taste it had left her with, it was time to stop hiding from the truth. She was a woman in love. You could be independent and be in love, couldn’t you? Could you?

  Maybe she’d tell him. Yes, that was exactly what she should do: Life was short and summer was even shorter. Why wait for him to say it again?

  Olivia was opening the shop, so before Joy went in to work she took Pickles out for a walk through Rodman’s Hollow. Maggie, who was awake uncharacteristically early, came along—a rare treat. At the end of the walk they took Mohegan Trail to Spring Street to get back into town, and Joy’s organs constricted only a little when she saw that the Roving Patisserie was parked near the post office, a little too close to Joy Bombs for Joy’s taste. There was already a line. Joy looked the other way. Soon it would be the end of July—summer was flying.

  Now it was just after one and Joy was dragging with a capital D. She made herself an espresso and knocked it back. Olivia was in the back of the shop overseeing the filling of six trays of pies. The door opened; the bell tinkled. In walked a woman, definitely not a local, not your typical Block Island tourist either. She walked up to the counter and shook her head so that the colored tips of her hair, which were blonder by half than the rest of her hair, swung back and forth. Joy watched the hair for a moment, fascinated, almost hypnotized. Swing, swing.

  “Hey,” said this creature, “I’m looking for Anthony. I heard I might be able to find him here.”